Paul: 0:29

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of MarketPulse's Pros and Pioneers podcast. This week I'm excited to announce our excellent guest, Kip John Whelpley. Kip, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Kip: 0:42

Thank you so much, Paul. I'm super excited to be here.

Paul: 0:45

It's been We must have spent the last 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get technology to play ball with us, right?

Kip: 0:51

Have been some technical difficulties. Yeah. I'm almost waiting right now. I'm like, is it going to cut out? I don't want to move. I'm just going to stay real still.

Paul: 0:57

If you're out there and you're on the fence about starting your own podcast, get some help to get started because even the pros have problems. a little bit of Kip's background. So Kip is the CEO at Kip John Collaborations. We, who are an award winning applied behavioral science company. Kip's known for his work in human centered leadership, and he blends a background in psychology, Theatre and Behavioural Science to guide Fortune 100 Executives, Special Forces and Hollywood Elites towards transformational leadership. That alone just sounds so exciting. I can't wait to dive into this. KIP has founded multiple successful ventures including an international dance camp and a cannabis retail brand. His unique coaching approach integrates emotional intelligence, psychological safety and leadership development. Helping leaders inspire lasting change and high performance in their organizations. Wow. That is a right up and a half. Impressive.

Kip: 1:56

wish I could take credit for it, but you got to get the pros to do that stuff. It makes me sound way cooler than I am really, but it's okay. I'll go with it.

Paul: 2:05

This is the art of the internet, right? This is the internet. At least you're not relying on AI to write your background for you. How do you get to a point where you're able to combine psychology, theatre and business, Kip? What's your origin story? Please tell us.

Kip: 2:21

a good question. And it's it wasn't initially on purpose. I've just a a classic kind of Renaissance brain, ADHD, all that kind of stuff wrapped in one. So I just and I had parents that were really encouraging to go try people out. Whatever you were interested in from the early set. But the long story short was the deep interest was on, on human beings and humaning. And when you put all of those things, when you say them apart, it it seems really diverse, but the reality is it's they're like the trifecta of human behavior. Like theater, you're learning all about how to connect with an audience and how to tell great stories and do that kind of thing. And then when you're in psychology, you're, you're getting right deep into the mind and how it works and all of the, what makes us do what we do, why we choose what we do. And then you put that into business and it's really that catalyst piece that puts them all together. And every type of business that's out there that I work with, you're. Like I say you're humaning all the time. It's really, it worked out that, that was the the perfect background for me to have to do what I'm doing.

Paul: 3:23

And behavioural science is something that has been up and coming for quite some time, and some people have been using it for a lot of years but I think in the mainstream it's been quite unknown until the last sort of five, maybe ten years. How did you get involved with behavioural science?

Kip: 3:38

lucked into it. I I fell into it in a cool way. One of the professors that I was working with when I was finishing university I was taking a teaching class and I wanted to go in and learn how to teach, and then of course, cause I was into theater, I was like I'll take a teaching class. class that teaches theater. That'll be cool. And the professor that I was working with his main job was working in the world of behavioral science. And it was very much at the frontier at that time. And science hadn't caught up with it yet in, in the world of being able to prove the theories that there were out there. So the stuff that he was doing seemed like magic, it was like almost like a mentalist. I was like, wow. Like you, you mean. If you do this, that'll cause this and then people will then, I was like, this is amazing. And So I really, I surrounded myself in his world and really dove into that world with him. And he just, because he was on the frontier edge, he had some of these wild clients, like amazing clients that I would have never had access to, that early on. And like again, like special forces teams, fortune 100 company, the people that were really paying attention to this because they knew it worked. And there was very few people that were working in that world, especially the the applied side. So I stayed with him and worked with him and trained. And the question was always like, do I go back in university and get master's and doctorates and things like that? And. I was like, no, this is, they're not teaching this in university. They're, they're still trying to figure out how to map it and that kind of stuff. And like you said, only in the last five, 10 years of the has the science caught up, which is exciting for me because it's caught up to be able to do the studies, to do the scans, to do all of the pieces that are backing up what we've been doing for the previous, 20, 30 years to say that. It works not just because we've been doing it, but because here it is in the brain. Here's the proof that we need as human beings to to back it up. So yeah, I started early and just kept going with it and and evolving as it evolved. And my client's needs evolved and kept going that way.

Paul: 5:37

So I guess a lot of our audience who are watching this are small to medium enterprises, right? And if I'm them sat in the audience watching this, I'd be thinking that's all well and interesting. And if I add lots and lots of money to throw around, then I'd definitely be getting involved in behavioral science. But what does this mean to me? And I think what I think you'd be able to share with the audience is just how accessible behavioral science is in this day and age for small businesses. Any size business, not just the larger enterprises who can afford consultants and entire teams of scientists and researchers. How does a small to medium enterprise start to understand behavioral science enough to be dangerous with it, in your opinion?

Kip: 6:19

the world now is, now that it's accepting it, it's understanding it it's it's not a pseudoscience anymore. And, it's, I think small businesses, medium sized businesses have the advantage. They're nimble. They can take and learn the practices and put them in play right away and beta test them and see what's happening and that kind of thing. Like they can move really quickly. Whereas a lot of the clients that I have, there's a huge ramp of adoption and things that have to go through and that kind of stuff. So don't let the fact that that I'm working with really large companies or that you see. Those kind of people adopting it scare you. It's great that they're doing it, but really you have the advantage as the smaller guy getting into the field and the advantage to where you can pick up some books, you can do some YouTube searches. You can do some research on your own and you don't have to have a, super expensive consultant and shape your whole thing to get started. You can get in there and start. Understanding why we do what we do and how that works and understanding biases and heuristics and all of those different pieces that have big words, but essentially it's just why the hell do we make the choices that we make? They don't make any sense. They're not logical. How do I navigate that? And that's really what behavioral science is trying to make sense of the fact that we think we're rational, but we're not. How do we do that? How do we live in that world? And small businesses, yeah they're the ones that can really benefit from this because, like I said, they can play with little things, little tweaks here and little ideas and concepts and put them right into play.

Paul: 7:49

So should they approach it from a business perspective or from almost a scientific perspective, in your opinion? Should they be putting a hypothesis first and then testing that out?

Kip: 7:58

I'm not sure if it's a prescribed way to do it because it's up to the person. And again, everything that, and you're going to see that with a lot of behavioral sciences it's about the human it's not blanket all the way across, right? We're all so complex and everything else. So that while it may seem political and wishy washy, what I'm saying it depends on you, who you are. But the point is that what side of it interests you? Is it the deep scientific side? Cool. Get into it. You know what I mean? If it is the play and do something first and then experience it later, if that's what interests you, you've got to go with what your passion is. Myself, I like the blend of both, right? Like I get in there and I think, okay, Here's my idea. This is what I want to do. This is how I want to do it. Now, what's some of the science that can support that or help me shape that, get into that? And then I'm like, okay, I've got this little pile of mess here. I'm going to let's try it, throw it out there and you pay attention to what the results are, right? And you have, you run your own little experiments on what you do. So yeah, there's no right way to attack it. The right way to attack it is just to attack it. Get in there get messy with it and start playing with it. Listen to podcasts, listen to people who've done it. There's some fantastic thought leaders out there. Just get into it. It's really cool. And as we've talked before, it's up and coming for a long time, up and coming, but it's starting to gain some serious weight now because people are paying attention to how incredibly beneficial it is.

Paul: 9:21

And then, the other part of your background is in human centred leadership. For anybody who's not familiar with that, what's a whistle stop tour of what that actually means? Cause, it kinda sounds a bit thought leadership, right? It sounds a bit buzzword y, but what does it actually mean?

Kip: 9:34

It's It is. And it's interesting because I, for a long time have danced around with what it's called. And centered was probably a cat, a coin phrase, right? That, that made it as accessible as possible. But what it is realizing that we are human beings. And that's the type of leadership that you should be paying attention to. And the difference being is that there's a lot of like, when you go get your MBA, when you're trained in leadership, when you're doing all that kind of stuff, they spend the majority of their time focusing on systems and tools and, that kind of very analytical process to managing people and leading people are very different things, right? So managing people, really, you're not managing people, you're managing tasks, right? And there is a very logical way to sort that out, right? And that's what we tend to lean towards in school in teaching because logic's easy to teach, right? And it's easy to learn. It's memory, right? Whereas human Behavior, human leadership skills, human centered leadership skills, are all understanding the human being at the core, and how to motivate them, how to drive them, how to, access the empathy, the trust, the compassion, the connection, all of those pieces, which are fuzzy. And hard to teach and hard to, quantify. That's the difference. I work on the humaning side and and lean towards that. Whereas a lot of other leadership consultants would work on the systems, analytics, all that kind of management side.

Paul: 11:06

I laugh when you're talking about that because it sparks a lot of memories of my own, from my own leadership experience. And I came very much from that background of being thrown in at the deep end without the the education. I never got the MBA or the leadership qualifications and you're just expected to sink or swim. And I swam often in spite of the support and tutoring that I was getting as opposed to because of it. And. It felt like something that organization really battled with for a long time was they were determined to try and make more good leaders in their business and they went about that by teaching them to be good managers and the good leaders still became good leaders in spite of all of that but they could never seem to bottle that to create more of that and the more they tried to follow the management route and teach people the management route the more failure they created within the business But couldn't really identify the root cause as to why, and actually a lot of it stemmed from upper leadership. It's interesting It's a

Kip: 12:07

Heard it so many times. It's so true. And it's it's indicative of the the world that we live in. And I get it. It's because.

Paul: 12:15

Yep.

Kip: 12:16

is hard. It's hard. We're complex. We all have different languages, and I don't mean verbal, just subconscious languages that we understand, speak and paying attention to that takes work, right? And it takes practice. It's not something that comes instantly to people. Some people are like, yeah, natural born leader, natural, and there's certain qualities that we all have that some lead more into being applicable to leadership. It could be coding. We have certain qualities that lead into coding. Like it's that kind of thing is there for sure. But leadership itself is learned. It's the same as marketing. It's a learned skill. You just don't. Come out of the womb, amazing at it, right? And unfortunately over time we've always just had it as a sink or swim type learning method, right? It's okay, you were great at doing this task, right? And this kind of thing, you're great in this field. So now what we want you to do is we want you to lead a whole bunch of people who are good at that. You're not doing the task anymore. You're leading people to do the task, right? Which is a totally different skill set, right? So it's a, I'm reiterating what you're saying, but it's one of those things where it's okay, so now you're leading people. So what does that look like? What is it? Humans are hard. So how do we motivate them? Can you motivate a human? How do I keep them from, lynching me as a leader? How do I, there's so much, and then all your own insecurities and your own jam in there, right? So it's ah, classic.

Paul: 13:40

It's an example I see a lot in the sales environment. The best salesperson gets promoted to leader of the sales team, and then guess what happens? Chaos. Because they're now responsible for their own targets that they originally had, plus everybody else's, and no idea how to motivate people, other than to beat them with a big stick. It's a painful lesson. It's a painful lesson. I wonder then, human centered leadership, can you translate that into human centered marketing? Good.

Kip: 14:03

It's it really is. It's the principles of leading people are totally transferable to leading your marketing campaign, because again, you're also leading people. And I think people overcomplicate it really is what happens to it. When you are trying to connect with. Your team, you have to use empathy, trust, connection, right? Listening. You have to be really in tune with them. You have to be hearing what it is that they're saying in a way that is much deeper than the surface level. How is that any different than the people that you're marketing to? It shouldn't be if it is. And those kinds of things too are you are you focused so heavily on the task? That you are forgetting about the human being, who's doing the task, take it to marketing. Are you so focused on the, advantages that you're, or the little widgets and things that, you know, the technical things that your product does or can you know that kind of stuff? Or are you focused on the people who are gonna be actually using or should want to use your product? Those are different focuses, right? One is going to attract a huge amount of people and create a following and a loyalty and a commitment. Whether it's in leadership or marketing. And the other one is it's interesting. I ramble on a little bit, but in the world of humaning, we're governed by two parts of the brain and people probably heard this before. And it's, it's common now that we know it, but we have our conscious mind and our subconscious mind is what I talk about when I'm talking about humaning. Our conscious mind. It really only does about one to five percent of stuff. It's really not that active. It, we pretend that it's the big one driving the bus, but it's not. The subconscious mind is the one that's making all the decisions. Your conscious mind just justifies the decisions you made, right? So even I see it all the time. We, at the house too, and I do it too. I'm like, I just bought this new microphone. Why did you buy that? Because it has this, and this. I'm like, I have three microphones. I don't need another microphone. But it makes me feel good to have one. I feel great. Something drove me. I had a need. I needed to get that dopamine hit and those other kind of things to buy the microphone. But I'll justify it using all of the facts. And the justification comes from your subconscious, or from your conscious mind, right? If you learn to lead and market towards the subconscious, the real driver of everybody's behavior, you're gonna win. If you're focusing on the conscious mind, that's not the one making all the decisions, it's just the one that justifies them, right? So that's the difference.

Paul: 17:09

Yep. Instead of selling the bells and whistles and the knobs and faders, just sell the experience of how good you're going to feel when you're on that microphone and you sound like a radio DJ.

Kip: 17:19

And then people will be like, yeah, that sounds great, this is good, and then that fills the need that's in here. And that's the difference. So are you filling the needs that are in your people that you're leading in here? Are you filling the needs that are in the people that you are attracting to your business in here? And that's where it all comes from. And then learning to talk those different languages is part of the process as well.

Paul: 17:39

I'm going to say this now and I'm going to say it loud and clear. If you're in SaaS, you need to download this episode and play that back. Listen to it one more time. Stop selling your features and benefits. Stop telling people about the new project that you've just dropped. Stop telling people about all the stuff that's coming on your roadmap because, newsflash, nobody cares. What they care about is what they're going to be mourning to. Morning about to their partner over dinner tonight and how hard their life is and why they're doing what they're doing and how their customers are really hard to reach. Make their life easier. Tell them how they're going to feel. Tell them what they're going to experience as a result of buying your products or services and how much easier their life's going to be and all their anxiety is going to be relieved. You'll do a much better job. I have that conversation so many times.

Kip: 18:28

fantastic point. And I have quite a few clients that are senior leaders in SaaS. And I think one of The big ones that I try to help them understand is because we're working on both things, right? Again, we're working on, they'll bring me on quite often for actually it's a split. Quite often I'll be on the marketing side. They want to understand the marketing component of behavioral science. Or they want to understand the leadership side. But the lessons are totally transferable across the two. And the one big one that I always push on is that worry about connection first, then content. If you think, and I'll explain this off for you a little bit, like in a meeting, we jump on meetings all the time and we jump on and we have an awkward few minutes where people have small talk and then we jump into the subject right away, right? And we do that all the time. And. Leaders that take a few minutes, if not more than a few minutes, at the very beginning of a meeting to really connect with everybody that's in that room that's on the Zoom to find a way to, and there's so many different ways to do that, to really connect with them, find out later on that the content that they had to put out and that everybody, they wanted to reveal to everybody is absorbed in such a way different way. And it's so much more powerful. And they don't even realize that it was all about the connection first. You connected with them on a human level. You found out who they were as human beings. And then the content, they were like, yeah, I love you. You're amazing. I want to connect with you. So tell me whatever you want. I'm in, right? It's no different than marketing. Have you connected with your audience? Are you just pushing a whole bunch of stuff on them right away? They don't want to hear it. They want to connect with you first. And that's where that whole concept of connecting with a brand and understanding the brand and everything else. They want to connect with you first. To get a feel of who you are, it's in the words. They want to feel who you are. They want to get who you are. They want to have all of that internal stuff. Then you can sell them whatever you want because you already have their heart. And that's where it comes from. And it's very similar to what. You do with your business, with the podcast and with that kind of piece, it's, it, there's a connection there. Like I, I know you now in a way where I'm like, yeah, I really like you. You're a good guy. What is it that you do? Oh, you do that? Oh I actually need that. That's, you're the person I'm going to go to for that. And that's how that's going to be. So having those relationships and those connection before the content is invaluable. It's a mind shift and it's a mindset shift, but it's one that is crucial across Both areas. Massively.

Paul: 20:54

for internal meetings as well as customer meetings, right? Networking meetings. You cannot get into the meat of a conversation until you've made, if it's possible, the people. It's not always possible. If you've made the people in that call smile. When you've smiled, you've connected. You've connected. Then you can go into other things. If they haven't smiled, you're not connected. If they never smile, big red flags, big warning sign. These people are not interested. They've got other motives, other ideas, and you're not top of the pile. And you've got to work so hard on that connection, but you're absolutely right. And I think these days, more than ever, people want that connection on their own terms even. And that's why video is so important because people want to do the research first. They only want to come to you. When they can't answer a question that's a game stopper for them. It's something that they can't get past. And if you can't do it, then they can't move forward with you. So they come to you because they've answered all the other questions and that one or two questions remain. And if you can knock those two questions down, they're your customer. They've already decided they want to work with you. That's where everybody needs to get to. But it's hard to share that, to be that vulnerable and transparent and organic. www. microsoft. com Freely, like you said, it's a mindset shift, right? It's hard to shift your perspective from, I need to put this video out to sell things, to, I need to put this video out to connect with people because then I can sell things. It's really simple when you say it like that, but that's all it is.

Kip: 22:29

But and that's the, there's a piece to that too, where it's, Creating a video is, we had trouble right at the beginning of this with technology, right? There's certain barriers in creating a video that Jam us up in our heads and make it, is my, like, how do I look? Is my background okay? Is the technology I'm working using? And then you get into all these technical things. And by the time you're there, you're like, okay, down, still down the technical road. What am I going to talk about wherever? And it's okay, it's almost like you have to take a step, right? I'm like, okay, you've got your world set up. And the reality is that people aren't that fussed about the technical things. They're But the video is so powerful because it allows you to access people in a way that's going to get a lot more of their senses than just a an image or a voice or anything else. You're getting the best you can sans being in person, right? Because again, our subconscious mind is going to pick up on all of the little things that are in there. So the big point is. If you are genuine and authentic when you do your thing, that's the goal. Not selling your product, not anything else, but just talk to people, talk with people, and be genuine and authentic. However that is for you, just do that. There's 8 billion people in the world. You're gonna find your tribe, right? Don't fuss and try to make everybody your best friend, just be you, and the people that will love and flock to you will find you, and then you can go from there to then the selling part and everything else.

Paul: 23:56

I love it. It's a beautiful way of putting it. A lovely expression. Thank you for that. As I ask all of our guests then, What's one marketing strategy or tactic that you wish business owners would just quit doing? What really grinds your gears?

Kip: 24:08

Again, I think, the simple one is going crazy and floating all of the, widgets and baubles and, things that your product does and everything else and that kind of stuff, don't. Don't go there right away. People will come once they, once their heart is into it, they'll come looking for that. And they can, as long as you have a place where you can find it, that's good. And that kind of thing. That's why they have, Amazon has reviews first and then the technicalities below, right? Like people want to be connected and they want to feel safe about what it is that you're selling. I really want people to lean into the behavioral science side because it's so incredibly powerful Start to understand why people do what they do and why they make the choices that they make, and really dive into that and lean into that idea of the fact that human beings need the connection first and stop trying to just, repetitively put out an ad all the time or repetitively do one thing or another, pay attention to it. And the other side of that too, is that start to shift the data you're looking at. And I say that because a lot of the marketing that we have follows data that is incredibly analytical on the side of the widget y bobbly side, right? What product aspects did they like? What probably, that's okay. That's okay to look at that, but then go deeper. Why did they like it? What about the human, center, the core, did that fill? Not some of the, they like it cause it turns left and it does, like really, that's technical. What is it about it that they actually really got out of that and find that and then start speaking to that? Get to those kind of places and those conversations and understanding the human side of it as much as you can. That would be my wish.

Paul: 25:52

I remember doing very technical 90 minute demos in my previous role. And we were a big fan of behavioral science and behavioral design as part of that SaaS software that we were selling. And I remember gloating over the behavioral science aspects of that because it was so much easier to connect people to the why and the emotions. And, look at these buttons. I don't care what the buttons do, but look how rounded they are. Isn't that easy on the eye? Now notice that none of our boxes have square edges because it's nice and easy on the eye. Do you know why that is? Because eyes, because roundness, because, babies are attracted to round we like faces, we like, it makes us feel familiar in it, calm and at ease. And you'd see people's face go, Oh, these guys have really thought about this. And we had, to be fair, we'd spent a lot of money on that behavioral design aspect of it. But, and quite often, that's what used to get us down to the next demo, to the next level, to the next. Ultimately, we'd end up talking about the features and widgets because we'd get to the technical people and that's all they cared about because that was their day to day stuff. But at the beginning, it was all about, look, we did all these interesting, cool things, not the things that you think we're going to talk about. And we never mentioned AI. But we're going to talk about, the colours, the palette that we use because it isn't this calm, doesn't it feel nice? Yeah, actually it does. You're right. It feels pretty, yeah, I like it.

Kip: 27:11

it's really interesting when you say that too, because there's a piece that you may not even have realized that they were probably paying attention to even more than that. When you said to them like, Oh, those guys really put some thought into this. That's probably the one that won. It's Oh, they cared enough to actually dig into this. They care about us. We want to work with people that care about us. Like that's now you're getting to the root of it. It's yeah, you're right. You're right about those things. All those pieces that you're pointing out, all the science behind that is really right, but Oh my gosh, you actually give a crap of what we're talking about. And you've put some time and energy into this and you're speaking to it with passion and with conviction that has attracted me to you right now. I am like, now I am trusting you as a human. And. Keep going, keep telling me more about what's going on. Like this is authentic. This guy's really into this. I want to know about it. That's even further down In the, whole like root of where it comes from. So those are those

Paul: 28:08

As opposed to putting a bullet point on the website that says, we really value our customers.

Kip: 28:13

yep.

Paul: 28:13

okay.

Kip: 28:14

Yeah.

Paul: 28:15

Other SaaS business in the world, right?

Kip: 28:17

And that's what, that's a given, right? You should, everybody should, that's not a big deal. When our big, product that's just, you should, I don't want to work with anybody that doesn't. So Yeah, I it's an assumed, right? So

Paul: 28:30

don't know. Kip, we could talk about behavioural science, psychological safety, dare I say NLP, all sorts of things for hours and hours.

Kip: 28:41

we could,

Paul: 28:41

Unfortunately, we try and keep the episodes to a limit where people will actually watch the whole thing. I'm going to draw it here and you're welcome to come back on the show, we're going to dive into this. And I've actually got a guest coming up in a minute. In a couple of weeks, who is a behavioral design expert that we used in my previous job and that

Kip: 28:57

Oh,

Paul: 28:58

advice from.

Kip: 28:59

Very cool. I'm looking forward to

Paul: 29:00

for Babs Crane's episode. Yeah you'll love she's got more degrees than I have teeth. It's interesting. She's so talented.

Kip: 29:07

Cool.

Paul: 29:08

if people are interested to learn more about yourself, Kip, and they're inspired by some of the things that you've talked about today, how can they reach you best?

Kip: 29:14

I think. The website's easy. It's kip at kipjohn. com is the email. kipjohn. com is the website, K I P J O N. Or LinkedIn. LinkedIn's good too. I like to, again, I just like to connect with cool humans. Feel free to reach out and you don't have to put a message in there or anything else. It's just, let's connect and chat and jam. And the more people you know, the the more you learn, right? And the more you connect with humanity. So I'm all about it. I love it.

Paul: 29:40

Just not the people that write, send me connect, dear, at the bottom of the post, no?

Kip: 29:45

Yeah there's that too. I still accept the the blind marketing. I worked as a BDS or BDM for a while and I get it. They have a job to do. I'll accept their LinkedIn requests as well, but I may not always answer back the the blind requests, but yeah.

Paul: 29:59

Love it. Thank you very much for being a fantastic guest. Have a fantastic week

Kip: 30:04

Excellent. We'll

Paul: 30:05

at home for coming along and watching and listening. We'll we'll see you next week on MarketPulse Pros and Pioneers. Bye Bye

Kip: 30:11

bye. bye.